Nintendo Adds High-Capacity Storage to Wii Game Console.

Nintendo Wii video game console has always been heavily criticized for the lack of high-capacity storage, which is needed to play downloadable games. Nintendo at Game Developers Conference 2009 announced that with a new firmware the system would get support for SDHC (Secure Digital High-Capacity) flash memory cards that can provide up to 32GB of storage space.

“As the library of downloadable WiiWare and Virtual Console games continues to grow, Wii owners have asked Nintendo to provide easy, expanded storage space. Starting today, Wii owners will be able to save downloaded WiiWare, Virtual Console video games, and Channels directly to High Capacity SD cards, in addition to SD memory cards,” a statement from Nintendo reads.

To play games that have been saved to SD cards, consumers will be able to select and launch them from an SD Menu icon on the Wii Menu. This feature is included in the latest version of the Wii System Menu Update, which owners will receive immediately after performing a system update.

While adding SDHC support to Wii is definitely a good news for its users, it is regrettable that during the keynote at the Game Developers Conference 2009 Mr. Satoru Iwata did not update the audience regarding the adoption of Wii MotionPlus game controller with improved precision by game developers. Besides, Mr. Iwata also did not reveal any plans for video streaming services for Wii, something that the console lacks.

Mr. Iwata also confirmed shipment of the 50 millionth Nintendo Wii game console, thus, once again confirming the extraordinary success of the device.

Nintendo Wii features IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture-based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that operates at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii uses 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console also has a card reader, which allows installing more memory.